Review of Ken Mather’s “Trail North: The Okanagan Trail of 1858…”

Want to read a great book? Here’s a story of an early cattle trail from Oregon to the gold mines of British Columbia, that helped to define this place long before most areas of the West had any kind of cattle culture at all.

I just reviewed Ken Mather’s Trail North for the Ormsby Review. You can read the whole review here, with pictures, maps, and all the details: https://bcbooklook.com/2019/01/06/461-the-american-invasion-by-the-okanagan-trail/. This is an important and well-researched book. To whet your appetite, here’s a picture from it, of Mexican vaqueros, with their Mexican pack horses, in the Okanagan, a long way north of Mexico a decade before anyone thought of the famous Chisholm Trail.

This is a Blog about People in Place

I am working at rebuilding human relationships to the earth, growing the global from the local and developing new environmental technologies out of close observation of the land. The land is the watershed and run of the Okanagan River in the North American West, and the Chilcotin and Columbia volcanic plateaus and basins that surround it. It is the goal of this blog to build the future now and to do it through attention to art, earth, science and beauty, so that there is, actually, a future for our children and a path for them to feel out their way to the earth should they ever find themselves in the dark. The project will lead to two book manuscripts in the summer of 2013, one on the salmon of the Okanagan River, the last major run on the Columbia system, and the other on the connection between the Manhattan Project and the political and industrial face of Eastern Washington and Southern British Columbia. They will do so within the broader context of land-based technologies, in forms that are simultaneously art and science. In this land without borders, there is no international line at the 49th parallel, cutting our country in two, and no imagined wall between settler and indigenous cultures. We are all walking together. We are all the land speaking.